Yeah, it's kind of decent in multiplayer, but only when the server gives you enough money to buy everything right off. Which kind of makes the whole money-earning thing somewhat pointless. It's not very well-balanced; at least in Joint Ops or BFV you can walk out as an infantryman and feel able to accomplish something, but in Soldner you pretty much have to be a sniper or drive a tank to get anything done.

It's approximately ten dollars worth of fun, in my estimation. I'll be playing Joint Ops and BFV a lot longer than I'll be playing Soldner.

http://www.matthewrorie.com
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You know, I always find it annoying when people post that whole "Is this the patch that makes the game fun?" thing, but I'm pretty sure this game is beyond help.

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Why do you hate America and freedom, JosephBlowski?

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Man, Take-Two cut their earnings estimate for this quarter by 50 million dollars. Wonder what got delayed.

http://www.matthewrorie.com
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Dictionaries are hard.

http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=advent

# The coming or arrival, especially of something extremely important: the advent of the computer.
# Advent

1. The liturgical period preceding Christmas, beginning in Western churches on the fourth Sunday before Christmas and in Eastern churches in mid-November, and observed by many Christians as a season of prayer, fasting, and penitence.

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Personally, Ray, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who likes turn-based RPGs. It had problems at launch (mostly because the publisher forced them to put it out with some ungodly development cycle, something like ten months), but nothing that prevented me from getting all the way through it, and after a couple of patches it should be fine. Very, very fun game, in my opinion, although, yes, it is just a bunch of combat sequences for the most part. There isn't much in the way of an epic plot, but it's a fun game.

It looks like the retail price is 29.99, which is perhaps a bit high if you're not familiar with it. There is a playable demo which I believe incorporated all of the major bugfixes from the first patch, which you can download here:

ftp://ftp.infogrames.net/demos/toee/ToEE_Demo.exe

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This game would be pretty tight if there was Live support. How publishers get away with not even throwing in simple head-to-head racing when a game comes out on Xbox is beyond me.

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"Does anyone know is Jordan Mechner is also involved with this one?"

I believe that he owns the rights to the PoP brand, so at the very least, this game is being produced with his imprimatur. Whether or not he's going to be up in Montreal while they make the game is another matter.

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There's a Starcraft team in korea made up of five or six guys that just got a 3.5 million dollar endorsement deal. It was in the last issue of PC Gamer or somesuch.



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I'm curious about this; does anyone know precisely how many copies DS sold? I know the budget on the original game got up to the five or six million dollar range, which, even with Microsoft behind the company, is a lot for a first-time developer, if I'm not mistaken. (I know that it was the guy behind Total Annihilation, but still.)

Just curious if it was actually profitable in the long run.

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I have the beta. It's...pretty fantastic. You can check my screenshots at matthewrorie.com. I've been posting a lot at the worldofwar.net message boards, which are a good place to go if you have specific questions.

http://forums.rpgforums.net/forumdisplay.php?f=7

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2500+, 1 gig of ram, 9800 pro and it runs very, very nicely. Went with defaults to everything except texture detail (Very High) and Shadows (low), and it looks great and plays great. Nice-looking game.

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I've said this before, but damn if DiCE doesn't make the best game trailers. Can't wait to get the game. Thanks, Fedex, for making "overnight shipping" that takes two days.

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I just hope their mappers stay together as a team and produce a new mod of some sort. I'm not a huge fan of EoD, but they undeniably make the best maps of any BF1942 modding team.

By the way, thank god for reduced accuracy on the machine guns. Those things are like sniper rifles when you go prone; they're wayyy too accurate at long range.

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I find it to be pretty handy. I haven't noticed any obvious cheaters on a punkbuster server with a game that supports pb. I've never noticed any cheaters in BF1942 since they added PB support, for instance. It helps a lot, in my opinion.

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Anyone ever play Hyper Blade? I think I got it as a pack-in with my old GeForce256 DDR. Same kind of brutal blood-sport thing going on, except for the fact that you could chop off your opponent's heads and use them to score goals with. It was pretty neat.

Given that it was a video card pack-in, though, I kind of doubt that it was all that popular.

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Did they fix the way that your character was blind in the first one? It got a little tiring to be wandering around in a sea of black all the time. I don't mind fogging the minimap when you start the game, but not being able to see more than five feet in front of your character got real annoying real quick.

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" WooHOo! I just bought an FX the other day, I'm so happy! *yawn* It's sad when I don't feel so much impressed going from my Ti4400 to it."

I just went from a Ti4400 to a 9800 Pro, and I don't see much difference myself. I suppose it'll be a different story when these newfangled games with their new tech come out, but apart from anti-aliasing, there's really not much difference between this card and the one I got two years ago. Image quality is a bit nicer, but that's about it.

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Doesn't Nvidia generally just pay developers and publishers to let them say this stuff? I can't imagine that every demo I've gotten in the last few weeks has had that The Way It's Meant To Be Played splash screen just because devs like Nvidia.

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Too bad the add-on will apparently emphasize Panzerklein combat. I fucking loved the game until the mechs came in; it went downhill quick after you were forced to adopt to the new escalation in warfare.

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